Gabriele Stötzer
Abwicklung (Unwinding)
Gabriele Stötzer was one of the most rebellious and radical artists in the former GDR. She was affiliated with the Prenzlauer Berg art scene in Berlin and the super 8 film scene in Dresden and regularly worked with other artists. Her multi-media and interdisciplinary art includes painting, photography, film, clothing and fashion, performance, photography books and writing. She created her own pictorial language, subverting and rebelling against the official role of women in the GDR and patriarchy in her art. Her confrontational search for female utopian worlds brought legal repercussions and rejection from fellow artists. She spent a year in jail for signing a petition when the government took away the songwriter Wolf Biermann’s citizenship in 1977. She ran the private gallery, Galerie im Flur, until it was closed down in 1981. In 1984, she co-founded one of the few groups of women artists in the GDR, Exterra XX, which organised films and fashion shows that claimed a place in public space where life and art could merge in a sensual way. Stötzer is also an acclaimed writer who published samizdat works such as Dabeisein und nicht Schweigen (1977), along with numerous books of autobiographically inspired prose, including Zügellos (1990) and Der lange Atem (1993). Most recently, she released Der lange Arm der Stasi: Die Kunstszene der 1960er, 1970er und 1980er in Erfurt – ein Bericht (2026). BS
The performative series of photographs "Abwicklung" (Unwinding) can be read „as a (feminist) echo of the French artist Yves Klei —whom she did not know— who, in his so-called Anthropometries, had female models press their naked, ultramarine-painted bodies onto canvases in erotic poses. More than 20 years later, Gabi Stötzer (then Kachold) staged herself as an artist by sliding her ketchup-smeared body across lengths of paper, like a bloody externalization of loss and pain. This work stands as a representative example of the artist’s search for a visual language that, with emotional depth, humor, and confident strength, ventures a female breakthrough into new aesthetic territory despite the constraints imposed by the state.“ BS
courtesy Gebriele Stötzer